The hours worth driving for
There is a particular kind of Friday evening decision that every landscape photographer knows. You have Saturday free. You have four places you could drive to. And working out which one is worth the early alarm takes four apps and twenty minutes, at which point you give up and go to the one you went to last time.
The reason it takes twenty minutes is that four separate things have to line up, and no two of them live in the same place.
The four things
The light. Not just sunrise and sunset, but which of them works at that spot. A west-facing beach is a sunset location; photographing it at dawn is a long drive for backlit disappointment.
The forecast. And not “will it rain” — that is the least interesting question. Total cloud cover at golden hour is what decides whether you get colour or grey. Broken cloud is the prize. Clear skies are often worse than they sound.
The tide, if there is any water involved. A stretch of coast can be a completely different photograph at low water than at high, and the good state might last forty minutes.
What is moving. Seals haul out at certain times of year. Waders arrive in autumn. The Milky Way core is only above the horizon for part of the year, and only dark enough for part of the night.
Each of those is knowable. The problem is never that the information is secret — it is that checking four sources and then holding the answers in your head long enough to compare Saturday against Sunday is genuinely tedious, and tedium is what turns a decision into a habit.
What most of us do instead
We check the weather, decide it looks alright, and go somewhere familiar. Which is fine, and it is also why so many of us have forty versions of the same photograph and none of the one we actually wanted.
The frustrating part is that the good windows are not rare. A given fortnight usually contains two or three genuinely excellent hours somewhere within driving distance. They are just hard to find, because finding them means cross-referencing four datasets across a dozen locations and ten days, which is arithmetic, not photography.
Letting something else do the arithmetic
That cross-referencing is exactly the sort of job a computer should be doing, and it is what Optimal Windows in Apex Lucis is for.
It takes the locations you have saved, and for every shooting window over the next ten days — sunrise, sunset, golden hour, blue hour, moonrise, and any low tides — it scores the combination of light quality, the forecast for that hour, the state of the tide, and whether anything is seasonally active at that spot. Then it ranks them.
What comes back is a list, best first: a place, a date, a window, and a score. The top of the list is the single best hour it can find anywhere you shoot. Further down, a quiet Tuesday at a location you had half-forgotten, which is usually the more interesting result.
Two details matter more than they sound. The scan stops at ten days, because that is as far as the weather forecast reaches — scoring day fourteen would mean inventing the weather and then ranking real days against imaginary ones. And no single day can dominate the results, because a Saturday with a dozen candidate windows would otherwise bury the whole of the following week.
When you find one worth committing to, it becomes a booking, carrying the tide and light times for that date at that place with it.
Optimal Windows is a Pro feature.
Free scans cover three locations over three days, which is enough to see whether the answers are any good. Pro scans every location you have saved, ten days out.
The Optimal Windows guide → covers running a scan, reading the scores, and the filters — including how to search for one specific kind of window when you already know what you are after.
